I am Julene Summerfield, daughter of Edith Macdonald and Bernie Coady. I am married to Everett Summerfield, an R.C.M.P. officer and we have four children: Coady (23), Anne Marie (22) Annette (17), and Tansi (15). I along with my brother and sisters grew up in Alberta, but through mom and dad heard many stories of Cape Breton, the people, the land, and the history, especially the mines and of course the music.

Being married to an R.C.M.P. meant we moved a lot, in fact we moved about every 2 years.

In 1996, we were living in Evansburg, Alberta, a small town about an hour’s drive west of Edmonton. Everett came home in the middle of the afternoon one day in early March. I knew from this afternoon visit something was on the move, probably us. It is not in Everett’s nature to come home from the office for coffee in the middle of the afternoon.
He said he had to call Ottawa. He placed the call. From the way he was answering the questions I knew it was a move. I am standing in front of him motioning for him to write down where we were going. He had this mad look of his face, which told me I best back off.

When he finished his phone call, he sat in the chair in the kitchen, rubbed his head, and calmly (let me tell you this man is always calm) said pour coffee and sit down. He then told me indeed we were being transferred, but this transfer would be different because it came with a promotion to the rank of Inspector.

This was a big surprise, now came the where, Everett took a pencil and wrote the letter “H� on a piece of paper, I stared at the paper, I could not believe it.

“Hâ€? Division in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is Nova Scotia. I was shaking. Never did I ever dream I would get to visit Nova Scotia, but to be transferred there and live there… My head was spinning.

Now as with everything with good news there is a hitch, the person who has to sign off the transfer because of the promotion was the Commissioner of the R.C.M.P. and he was away and would not make the official announcement for two weeks, so we were told we could tell NOBODY.

Oh, my stars I was almost insane. Part of me wanted to scream at the top of my lungs what was happening, another part of me knew I could not say a word. So we waited.
When we finally got the official word, this is how I told my kids.

I had a cassette tape called Cape Breton at the Cohn. It was a live recording of a concert done at the Rebecca Cohn Theatre in Halifax and all the artists were from C.B. So I took the tape and recorded on a blank tape the opening “Live from the Rebecca Cohn Theatre, in Halifax, Nova Scotia welcome to Cape Breton at the Cohenâ€?, then I fast-forwarded the tape to play “We are an Island.”

When the kids came home from school, I called them all into the living room and made them sit down; they knew something was up because this was a part of the transfer ritual. I turned the tape on and was bursting at the seams. The kids looked at me as if I was crazy, when the tape finished the four kids looked at me and said, “Are we going to Nova Scotia?”

I said, “You bet we are, and kids, for all intents and purposes we are going home.”

We left Alberta May 31, 1996, for Halifax.